Most People are Not Interested in What is Good

There has been a subtle, but important shift in what most people are interested in - what they think is possible, and desirable - and what they want to do themselves.

I am speaking of most people (and most companies) here - who do not think about what is going on, but are very good at keeping their feelings in tune with other people's feelings.

They are emotional conformists, who believe in groupthink - a pattern of thought characterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics (from Merriam-Webster). 

And most of the input they get is from the social media, primarily Television - but also Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

I just read a long, serious article on WIRED magazine, about Facebook. That you really ought to read. It says Facebook is growing up, and becoming more ethical. Even at the expense of becoming less profitable. And it is doing this by tweaking its algorithms.

It still believes the Computer can understand people - better than people can! People have spent millions of years, fighting with other people - and one of the weapons they use is deceit. As a result, they have learned ways of detecting deceit - mainly by reading body language.

Computers are still limited to what people write, and cannot detect body language (although this may change in the future, when people get wired in). So much has been written about Artificial Intelligence, people assume the Computer has broader kinds of intelligence also.

I disagree, and I want to explain why I disagree.

I will not go into a long-winded philosophical discussion, but start with something more recent -Google's search engine. That was truly revolutionary, insightful - and profitable. Which most people did not bother to understand.

It was based on the Internet, which most people did not understand either. They only knew there was a lot of information there - and they wanted some way of getting at that information - and making money off of it.

Google's solution was simple - scan (look at) all the information on the Net. And rank all of it, based on how often other sites referred to it.

But to do this, it first needed to look at everything out there - a staggering amount of information. So it developed some clever hardware and software that could crawl the Web, and reduce it (index it) to something much simpler. That people (and companies) could use easily.

Google made its Search available (that cost it a lot of money) for free - and used it to place related advertisements (on the side) that made it lots of money. This was a standard Capitalistic tactic - invest money, to make even more money.

But most people had stopped thinking about The Good (something hard to understand) - and concentrated instead on something easy to understand - using the Computer to make money!